Metropolitan Suite: A Home Base for Beauty & Wellness Pros in Lyon Park

Beauty operators who need to develop a client base and gain valuable experience in order for their business to flourish are often at a loss.

Going out on their own is prohibitively expensive and a great risk for the professional if it does not work out as planned. Many professionals never obtain the income they truly need or desire.

Which is why Arlington’s Metropolitan Suite is such an innovative — and for many — an important idea: Beauty and wellness operators rent fully equipped booths in a professionally operated salon — operators at the Metropolitan Suite only pay for the time they use at the facility. Metropolitan Suite offers operators a way to make the money a salon owner or a long-term lease renter makes without the overhead or worry.

Since the operators book their clients at their own convenience and pay for only the time they are in the booth, there is no more wasting time waiting for walk-ins. The professional can pay by the hour, the day or by the week. Longer-term leases for salon space are available for those operators who have the clientele following needed to be successful.

The sleek, modern and impressively up-to-date “luxury beauty lounge” on N. Pershing Drive is welcoming and comfortable, offering everything an operator needs to perform full salon services to the public including unisex hair cuts color, hair texture alteration services and styling.

Other professionals that operate their business at the nonprofit Metropolitan Suite are skin specialist, make-up artists, nail technicians, full-body waxing techs and licensed massage therapists. It’s a full-service salon offering everything a day spa offers.

Kinite McCrae founder and Executive Director of the Reach Far Foundation, was wondering how opening a hair salon would fit into her organizations’ non-profit purpose and agenda. After much thought and endless hours of research, it was decided to make Metropolitan Suite a hub for creating scholarships for underprivileged youth living in the metropolitan area.

Each client visit to the salon and or when an operator reserves a station, they are not only benefiting themselves but they are participating in the support of others.

“We also rent rooms for people to teach classes, in techniques they specialize in,” says McCrae.

Those community-oriented entities intend to help young adults or those looking to change careers so they may have the opportunity to chase their dreams and or get through a post-secondary trade school, says McCrae.

Coming soon, the Metropolitan Trade Academy will offer courses that lead to a license or instructor’s certificate in cosmetology, barbering or nails.